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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1223): Wed 6th Aug 2025 

Up extra early to begin our journey to Austria. We were originally told that we’d just be travelling past Vienna in order to get to our hotel for the night in Linz but this morning we were told that we would actually be getting four hours to explore Vienna after all. Vienna like most of the cities I’ve seen in this trip is stunning but after almost three weeks of constant travel the stunning architecture is have less and less effect on me. I’m putting this down to culture overload because when you’re Sunderland pond scum like me you so unaccustomed to seeing true beauty that often that three weeks of it can be too much. I walked around the town centre for a little bit and found a comic shop that was selling a Pinky and the Brain shirt but only accepted cash so I burned it down and went to get some ice cream. I’d come back to Vienna and to Bucharest just for the food because it’s amazing. I sat outside an ice cream shop and a mother was playing a game with her two hyper kids where she’d get them to run to a park bench and back and every time they got back she’d give them a spoonful of ice cream which was really sweet to see. We got to our hotel in Linz and I was immediately taken aback by the breathtaking view from my hotel window: 

I’m guessing this is where the hospital Hitler was born in used to stand so they bulldozed it to the ground. I didn’t bother going to dinner tonight because I couldn’t stand the prospect of another night of my ancient fellow travellers droning on at me so I just got some sandwiches and crisps from a nearby petrol station. Later on however I did decide to go down to the hotel bar to ask if they did any non alcoholic beers or cocktails. The bartender said he’d knock me up a non alcoholic gin and tonic which was nice of him but frankly it tasted like somebody dropped a lime in a glass of seawater. Tomorrow will be nonstop travel through Germany (hopefully I’ll get some nice pictures of the countryside) so I went to bed for an early night to get myself well rested for the very long day that long ahead. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1222): Tue 5th Aug 2025

Up early again for a guided walking tour of Budapest. Our tour guide this morning spent about ten minutes telling us about one particular building we went to just after the tour started. While she was in the middle of her talk another tour guide brought another group past the building, pointed at it, spoke about two sentences then moved on. This second guide clearly didn’t think this building was worth talking about so either she was underselling it or my guide was overselling it. To my embarrassment the guide caught me yawning a couple of times during the tour but it wasn’t just due to boredom it was just that I’ve taken in so many interesting facts that some of them can’t fit in my brain and are trying to escape through my mouth. She took us to a place called Heroes Square which was really impressive and I tried to get a nice video of a hot air balloon emerging from behind a giant pillar but the selfish cunt piloting it stopped when it was halfway up. Next up we were taken to the riverside for our riverboat cruise down the Danube river which I have to say was a major highlight of the tour. The vegetarian food they served us was beautiful and the the view of the Budapest landscape was amazing. One of my fellow travellers sat next to me nudged me and told me one of the waitresses kept looking at me and then commented that he’d be all over her if he was fifty years younger. I’m guessing he missed the bit at the start where the tour guide told us all that these particular waitresses were on their school holidays. After our food we went up on deck and took in the breathtaking scenery. The sheer effort that had gone into the designs of these buildings was almost overwhelming and the fact that it was so quiet on the river allowed us to breathe and take it all in. I hadn't expected much out of this riverboat cruise but I'm happy to say this was one of the definite highlights of the trip

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1221): Mon 4th Aug 2025

Off for Budapest, Hungary this morning which one of my fellow travellers who has been here before assures tells me will be one of the highlights of the trip. During our stop at a petrol station there was a long line for the mess toilets and one of the women on the trip said to me “I ought to take a picture of this: a queue for the gents” and then said it to every bloke who came out of the toilets. As much as I’ve loved this trip I dare say I probably won’t do another guided coach trip because even though I’ve made it clear I’ve had no intention of talking to any of my fellow travellers for some reason that hasn’t stopped them talking at me. I went outside to eat a snack but for some reason this petrol station had chosen to place the seating area right next to the drains where the coaches empty all the waste out of the toilets which isn’t exactly the first aroma I wanted to smell upon entering a new country because now I’m going to forever associate Hungary with the smell of shit (which is already what I associate with most cities in England). The hotel I’m staying in tonight is really nice and to my surprise has not only a swimming pool but a bowling alley but sadly they’re not in my room. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1220): Sun 3rd Aug 2025

I didn’t realise we had another day in Transylvania today before we move on to Hungary. Before we set off I tried to find a new pair of sunglasses as the ones I have now are cracked. I walked for half an hour before I found a shack but it didn’t open until nine o’clock when my coach was due to leave which is fucking typical so I had to walk around squinting all day. The tour guides took us to a village called Sighisoara (which I kept calling “SighiStardust”) which was actually really nice with some stunning architecture. We climbed all the way to the top of a hill where the guide intended to take us into a church which had 167 steps so I fucked that off and sat in a cafe for half an hour and waited for them. There’s a married couple on this tour and the wife has been butting in every time the husband tries to speak, nagging him and ordering him to take pictures every ten damn seconds. As we were walking there was a car following us and while we all moved out of the way the husband was so engrossed with the photo he was taking that he didn’t hear his wife trying to tell him about the car. Eventually the car slowly came up behind the husband and stopped so the wife said loudly “Will you move there’s a car right behind you” at which point the husband shot back with “There’ll be a car on top of you if you don’t shut up!”. Later in the tour we were shown a statue of Vlad The Impaler. I think I need to join the European tourist board because they haven’t even thought to sell Vlad The Impaler lollipops with his head as the lolly. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1219): Sat 2nd Aug 2025

Didn’t get any sleep last night because I can’t work the air conditioner so I had to sleep with the bedroom window open and the curtains drawn to keep the bugs out but that meant I could hear the traffic and the pedestrians from outside. I had to forgo the walking tour of Transylvania this so I could get some sleep but I wasn’t really that bothered as all I wanted to see in this country was “Dracula’s Castle” and now I can just catch up on my sleep. I ended up sleeping until three o’clock and afterwards went round the corner to this nice cafe and bought a nice tiramisu and a toffee eclair. Transylvania has now joined New York in the list of places I would visit just for the food because these treats were delicious. When I got back to the hotel I read a few of William Hope Hodgeson’s poems including a brilliant one called Bring Out Your Dead. When I get home I might start reading Hodgson’s poems and short stories then set them to ambient music and put them on YouTube. There shouldn’t be any copyright issues since the cunt died in World War One. Last night when I went for dinner the staff brought out an apple on a plate as my desert because think the tour guide must think that I’m a vegan not a vegetarian. When the other diners asked me if I was going to complain I said that if they baked it into a pie I would eat it. Well tonight as they we’re taking away our main courses one of my fellow diners told the waiter not to bring me an apple unless they’re going ti bake it into a pie…bitch stole my joke and did it in front of me. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1218): Fri 1st Aug 2025

Up early AGAIN to begin the next leg of our journey from Bucharest to Bran Castle AKA Dracula’s Castle…except of course it’s nothing to do with Dracula because there’s no evidence Vlad the Impaler ever actually went to this castle. So it’s a bit like The Caven in Liverpool where people travel all over the world to go to a club that The Beatles were never fucking in. Before we went to “Dracula’s Castle” we stopped off at an entirely different castle presumably because the drivers wanted a rest. The castle was right at the top of a big fuck off hill that we had to walk through a forest to get to. I thought that it would take ages for us to get to the top because of all the old people on the tour but luckily most of them got eaten by ogres on the way. On the way into the castle we saw an inscription written over the doorway "VEHITI DE VI INCHINATI". I think roughly translated it means “Nothing Beats A Jet2Holiday”. The tour guide took us through the various rooms of the castle including this one dedicated entirely to the former owner’s weapons collection. I would love to sneak in here after hours and place a Lightsaber among all the swords and revolvers. The floor we were walking on was incredibly creaky and it was a bit like walking on a pirate ship. This tour was okay but they missed a trick by not having a big plastic skeleton jump out from one of the wardrobes half way through the tour and scaring the shit out of everyone. Now that this shit was out of the way it was on to Dracula’s castle. We had a specially assigned tour guide to go with us from here to the castle but tragically rather than just wait until we got there and give us some key facts before she went in she blathered on for the entire trip about the complete history of Transylvania. We did get a laugh though because the driver has constantly been in at us for standing up without our seatbelts on and this lady was doing exactly that today and at one point we went over a bump and she stumbled and hit her chin on the back of her seat. We got to the foot of the castle which was populated by trinket stores with Dracula themed tat where the tour guide told us to wait for an hour while she went and got us tickets. As we dispersed I jokingly said to a lady from the coach: “Keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you see any Dracula stuff” and as I went to walk off she immediately called to me and pointed at the Dracula stuff on the first trinket store she passed. Bless her. I found a little cafe that did really nice coffee and the service was amazing but sadly I had to give them a zero star review because for some reason they’ve named themselves “Five To Go” instead of the obvious “Count Snackula”. Fucking idiots. Finally we got led up the massive hill towards Bran Castle which looks absolutely stunning and intimidating from the outside…inside however….well I don’t want to disappoint you if you haven’t been but it’s basically just a bunch of cheap Halloween tat once you get inside. They might as well have gathered all the trinket stores at the bottom of the hill and stuck it inside the castle. The courtyard is pretty cool but I walked about sixty thousand steps to get to the top of the tower only to find a decorative vampire figurine in a coffin and a movie of Dracula being projected onto a wall. I suspect that in order to get the most out of it you have to visit during Halloween season or in the dead of winter not in the summer during a heatwave. Plus it probably takes away some of the spookiness if there’s a hundred people in there at once like the anchovies in that episode of SpongeBob. It wasn’t a completely wasted journey though because I used the footage I took of the outside to stitch together this video: 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog(1217): Thu 31st Jul 2025

Up early for a walking tour of the city of Bucharest. First we visited the balcony where the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu gave his final speech before he was overthrown and executed. The crazy thing is I just found out about this guy a month before this trip and had I not watched a documentary about his trial and execution this would have meant absolutely nothing to me.

The tour was okay except the tour guides keep taking us to see damn churches and to me churches are a bit like episodes of Two And A Half Men, once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. However this was the first city I’ve visited where I was genuinely interested and didn’t have to entertain myself by making fun of their statues. The only other shitty thing about this trip is I keep getting calls from unidentified fucking numbers. I’ve left an answerphone message saying “Sorry I can’t answer right now as I’m driving to Transylvania dressed as a cowboy” but for some reason they don’t seem to believe me. After dinner I went for a walk around the area which was filled with beautiful women dressed up presumably for a night of clubbing so I’m guessing Bucharest is a party town. Fifteen years ago I would’ve been all over this but now I’d rather be on a mortuary slab than in a fucking nightclub. I got some ice cream and sat outside the hotel for a little while and got talking to a New Zealander who’s on the same trip as me who was really nice. She’s been using the travel company for years and according to her has done twenty trips and even lived in Hawaii for a year. It turns out she’s a big fan of that Tommy Robinson guy and believes that the only way the UK’s ills will be repaired is if he is prime minister. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’s fled the UK after being accused of assaulting someone at a train station but she still seemed like a nice lady even if we disagree politically. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1216): Wed 30th Jul 2025

I was supposed to be going on a walking tour of Veliko Tyrnovo this morning but I was absolutely knackered because somewhere across the river was having a disco last night so I didn’t get much sleep. So instead of a waking tour of the city I had a lying down tour of my hotel bedroom. We set off to Romania at eleven am and on the way the tour guides told us we’d be stopping for two and a half hours but there was a massive church up at the top of the hill we could go and look at to kill the time. What he didn’t tell us was that it would be 15 Lev to get in to the damn thing so I just stood outside while everyone else piled in. On the way back down I saw that someone had set up a shack selling handmade knives. I don’t understand why you would set up this kind of business miles away from civilisation. I’ve never been driving through the middle of nowhere and thought “I fancy stabbing something”. We set back off and I saw a couple having a wedding photo taken on an old crumbling bridge. This must’ve been where they first met when they were doing heroine underneath it. As we arrived in Bucharest I saw a bike repair shop called “Doctor Bike” and I’ll be honest I missed everything the tour guide was telling me about breakfast and our upcoming activities because I was picturing a television show called “Doctor Bike”. Tell me you wouldn’t watch a television show about a bicycle that was also a doctor. C’mon Netflix, the amount of shit you’ve commissioned this should be right up your alley. After dinner I got showered and settled down for an early bed when suddenly the sound of loud chanting and screaming started filling the streets outside. I looked out the window and the street below was packed with angry looking men with their shirts off marching down the street. A couple of them actually set fire to an electric scooter before they left which made me think maybe this was a protest against renewable energy but it turned out it was a football mob who were angry that their team lost. I found out the next day that the hotel staff were so scarred that they bolted the front doors shut. When I asked if the mob was trying to get in they said they were more worried about me going outside and fucking them all up with my ninjitsu skills. 

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Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (1215): Tue 29th Jul 2025

Turns out I read the itinerary wrong as we’re not going to Romania until tomorrow and we’ve got one more night in Bulgaria to kill in a place called Plovdiv. They dropped us off in a town to see an ancient amphitheatre that we had to climb all the way up a hill just to get a photo of but there was hardly anyone in there. I knew theatre was dying but this place was more empty than my list of matches on Tinder. I decided to go back down to the bottom of the hill, sit in the shade and write my blog while I waited for everyone else to get back. While I was there I looked up and saw this giant house at the top of the hill with a boulder with ropes wrapped around it. Apparently the owner of this house is scared that someone might steal his giant rock so he’s chained it to his house. 

After another hour of driving we found ourselves high up in the Bulgarian mountains where we were told we’d be stopping to see if the cafe would let us use their toilets which they did. The good thing about using toilet facilities this high up a mountain is that if they’ve run out of toilet paper you can just wipe your arse on a cloud. We eventually got to a nice city called Veliko Tyrnovo which has a lot of New Orleans-inspired architecture which I really dug. This time I made sure to ask the tour guide to tell the kitchen staff that I was a vegetarian and to his credit he immediately popped down to the kitchen and told the staff. However he then popped back up and said “The chef says he might be able to fix you a salad” at which point I told him it was okay and I would just go out and find my own god damn food. I’ve loved most of the tour so far but the food that Leger have arranged for us has been horrific. In this occasion it’s not that they’ve suggested salad it’s that they haven’t even committed to that, they’ve said that they “might” be able to fix me one, like I’m making their lives deliberately hard by asking for something that hasn’t got meat in it but they’ll try to find something but aren’t promising anything. The only thing that’s had a decent meal on this trip is the fucking mosquito that chomped on my back and legs in Italy. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1214): Mon 28th Jul 2025

Up early again for another guided tour this time of Sofia, Bulgaria. Thankfully the tour guide we had today was slightly more charismatic than the one we had in Belgrade so I was able to stay awake for it but that still didn’t stop me from getting bored. First we stopped at this giant church that I think would make a great Command Centre if they ever do another Power Rangers movie:

Next she took us along a king road made of yellow bricks that she said was constructed as a gift to a former empress of the city. It was nice but as you can probably guess this is all I was thinking the whole time we were walking down this road: 

Up next she took us into another giant church and pretty much went over the entire history of the church, the people who built it, the builders favourite foods, the builders grandkids favourite foods, literally everything there is to tell us about this church she told us about. It would’ve been quicker if she just read the Bible to us. 

Then we went to the grave of an architect who built most of the churches in this city and in his will he stipulated that a giant boulder from his favourite river 200 miles away be brought to Sofia and used as his headstone…what a wanker. If that was me I would’ve just thrown his body right in the trash: 

We stopped in a park for a quick rest in the shade and I saw a woman clearing leaves from the path with a brush. My god how depressing must it be to know that your job could be done by the wind?

Finally we saw a statue that was pulling the same face I pulled when YouTube removed the ability to skip adverts: 

This tour was okay but the tour guide went into too much unnecessary detail on some of the stops and a lot of them I didn’t really care about. Towards the end I actually said to her “For fucks sake! Just take us to some famous serial killer’s houses will you?!”

After I got back to the hotel and showered I went downstairs for the group dinner. For some reason the tour guides seem keen to bunch us all together and try to get us to mingle and make us best friends forever. The problem is I’m the youngest person on this tour by at least thirty years so it’s pointless me trying to relate to these people because my frames of reference are going to be completely different to theirs. They’re not going to know what Hollyoaks and AEW and I don’t know what it’s like to have my winter heating allowance cut off. The “appetiser” was a bowl full of shredded carrots and white cabbage…so coleslaw without the mayonnaise basically. Several of my fellow travellers actually got up and left before even having their main course, furious at having been given shit food by this “four star hotel” two nights in a row. Luckily for me they made a really nice risotto with mushrooms and cheese so I was the only one who had some nice food. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1213):Sun 27th Jul 2025

Up early again and very keen to get the fuck out of Belgrade. I came to this city with no expectations but was hoping there would be some hidden little treat to be found (turns out there is but it’s one of my fellow travellers’ wallet which the poor bastard never found). It was raining today and as I was waiting for the coach to arrive I was sat in the little seating area outside the hotel looking across the road at the dilapidated buildings and I have to say that shitholes for whatever reason have a certain haunting quality for me when it’s raining. During the day when I walked past this crumbling architecture it looked ugly but in the rain it looks quite beautiful and reminds me of the movie The Crow. However the rest of Belgrade has been an utter bore and this part of the trip ranks just below Darlington. I still had about 22 million Serbian dinar to get rid of and even after going into a petrol station and buying a basket of stuff I still had a handful of the stuff. This is like the Luna of money, I just can’t seem to get rid of it. On the Route 66 trip I would stare for hours at the breathtaking nature on the way to the next town but here there’s not much to look at so I’ve just played on my phone the whole time. We arrived at the back of the queue for border control to get into Bulgaria at around one o’clock and didn’t get through the final barrier until half five. This was absolutely soul destroying and I think all of us on the coach went slightly mad. At one one point after about two hours of waiting the bus moved five feet and everyone on the bus cheered like we’d just done the loop-the-loop on a fucking rollercoaster. The new driver told us that we were all going to have to get off the bus and let the border control guy check our passports. I would let him check my prostate if it would’ve gotten me out of that damn queue and into my hotel bed. We went into the passport office and the guy behind the counter checked my passport photo then my face to check it was the same person because in my passport photo I have much shorter hair. The thing is I did look like that when we joined this fucking queue. Finally after hours of waiting we were allowed to proceed on to Sofia, Bulgaria. Fuck me this wasn’t  border control this was border control-alt-delete. I’ve been to Bulgaria before in 2018 with the family just after Luna was born and I can’t stress enough how happy I am to be able to experience this country on my own without screaming kids and a nagging mother. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1212): Sat 26th Jul 2025

Up early for breakfast in Belgrade Thankfully they actually put on a decent spread today unlike the single bread roll we had in in the ship to Ancona. Truly a breakfast of champions…champions at the World Bulimia Tournament that is. We set off quite early for a guided tour of Belgrade and it may have been the best tour ever but I have no way of knowing because our tour guide was so damn miserable and her delivery was so flat and effortless that I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. She had the delivery of a doctor telling their patient that the chemotherapy wasn’t working. While we were walking through a park one of the other travellers realised he had lost his wallet. He asked us all to help him look for it as we made our way back the way we came but I think we were all so bereft of energy due to this boring tour bitch that we couldn’t be bothered to help so we just said we did. Eventually I think the tour lass realised that we just weren’t into it and then pretended that the town square we were in was the end of the tour. At the end of the Sarajevo tour we all tipped the bloke who took us around the city because he was friendly and charismatic but as soon as this tour was over we all fucked off in different directions like a firework going off. I decided that I’d seen all of Belgrade that I needed to see and frankly I can see why Gavrilo Princip walked for six weeks through the woods to get to Sarajevo. He clearly thought “If the alternative is to spend the rest of my life in this shithole I might as well risk my life in the woods and shoot some cunt”. Seriously I’m so looking forward to Bran Castle right now and that’s a testament to how shit Belgrade is that I’m looking forward to going to a vampires house. On a similar note I came up with a good way to document my visit to Bran Castle which you’ll have wait a few days to see. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1211): Fri 25th Jul 2025

Off early this morning for a guided tour of downtown Sarajevo and specifically the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip in 1914, an event which provided the spark necessary to ignite World War One. I first learned about the assassination from the documentary series Days That Shook The World twenty years ago and ever since then I’ve been fascinated by the story of the assassination, the events leading up to it and obviously the horrific consequences that came out of it. The fact that so many deaths happened due to one shot fired on a street corner in an ordinary, out of the way city has intrigued me ever since. I didn’t want to specifically book a week long holiday in Sarajevo just so I could see the site of the assassination which is why I was delighted when I saw this European tour which included the city in its itinerary. We started off at the Sarajevo town hall where Franz Ferdinand drove to after one of Princip’s co-conspirators threw a bomb at him that didn’t explode until Ferdinand’s car was way down the road. I’ve seen so many documentaries about the assassination that as we stood outside the steps of the hall I pictured Ferdinand furiously shouting at the Sarajevo representative who stood before him. Next we went up the road and over the Latin Bridge to the spot of the assassination. As expected I got the goosebumps I normally get when I’m about to cross an item off my bucket list. The fact that I was literally standing on the spot where Princip shot the Archduke and millions of men ended up dead because of it was a completely otherworldly, out of body experience. It baffles me that there people were walking past this historic site and paying it no attention as if it was just another pavement even though it’s arguably one of the most historically significant spots in the entire world. The world as we currently know it is the way it is because of an event that happened on this street corner 111 years ago. I took a picture of the site and then got a picture with me standing on the spot and even though I’ve been fantasising about visiting this spot since I was a teenager, never in those fantasies was I ever dressed like dressed like one of Britney Spears’ ex-boyfriends but what can you do? I took out my bucket list and crossed off “Spot Where Archduke Ferdinand Was Shot” and felt an overwhelming sense of joy that lasted pretty much the rest of the day and I’m guessing won’t be matched until I get to visit the spot where Donald Trump gets shot. Next we set off for Serbia and along the way I could’ve sworn I saw a bloke trying to fix his van wearing nothing but a thong but I’ve been on the road for five days now so I may have just hallucinated it. We ended up getting stuck at border patrol to cross into Serbia for over an hour before the cunts let us through. Why didn’t the coach driver just drive through the woods like in Ace Ventura 2? Finally after another four cunting hours of driving we arrived in Belgrade, Serbia. To be honest the only other thing I want to see on this trip is Bran Castle in Transylvania so everything else I get to see on the trip in Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria and Belgium is just a little added bonus. Thankfully this hotel we were staying in had decent WiFi not like the shit they had in Sarajevo so I was able to upload my photos to social media without having to stand on a chair and point the phone at a fifty four degree angle. I went to bed happy that I’ve finally managed to experience something I’ve dreamed about for a long time. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1210): Thu 24th Jul 2025

Actually managed to get a proper nights sleep last night despite the noise and vibrations of the ship making it feel like I was sleeping on top of a microwave. Also someone has genuinely brought their dog onboard the ship and it was barking round about the time I was trying to go to sleep. I honestly thought about sneaking into their room during the early hours and throwing the little cunt overboard. After we got off the ship to begin our journey through Split in Croatia we were told there would be a delay getting through passport control but the guy just waved us straight through. A rare bit of good fortune on this trip and the border patrol’s lackadaisical attitude means that I get to enjoy all the heroine I brought with me on the trip. The tour guide pointed out some local attractions of Croatia but told us unfortunately we wouldn’t be stopping off to see them. This is the fifth country we’ve visited since we started and we’ve only got to get out and explore one of them and I couldn’t even do any of the tourist stuff in Ancona because they didn’t accept Itchy and Scratchy money. Once we crossed over into Bosnia we stopped off at a nice service station with a great view of the surrounding valley and because the weather was scorching hot and some locals were playing some country music nearby it was like being in the badlands of America. After half an hour waiting to get through border control we arrived in Bosnia & Hergezovinia and went for a walking tour of a small town called Mostar. While our tour guide was telling us about a giant church he told us to come forward a bit to let another group that was comprised of mainly Asian tourists past and said “Careful guys they’re Asian so they all know karate”…wow! Apparently the Reform party has already set up a branch in Bosnia. We went to a bridge where people were being offered money to jump off into the water below. I would have done it because ever since Luna learned how to talk I’ve wanted to jump off a bridge but the guy said that you have to hit the water at a particular spot because there are jagged rocks beneath the surface. I would say that a good way to get around this would be either get rid of the rocks or do it from another fucking bridge. Having said that, my love handles are so enormous if the wind gets under them I’ll probably just slowly float down to the water like Mary Poppins with her umbrella. After a quite bite to eat we were off to our next destination Sarajevo which is pretty much the whole reason why I wanted to come on this trip because I’ve been fascinated by the story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand since I first saw it covered on an episode of Days That Shook The World. I was keen to go to the site as soon as we checked into the hotel but I was pretty tired so had some dinner and spent the rest of the day chilling in the room. Once I got bathed and ready for bed I saw that Hulk Hogan had passed away. While I can’t pretend he was a good person because he was a racist fuck I can’t deny that he along with Bret Hart, Sting and Goldberg are the reasons I got into wrestling in the first place. The first time I watched wrestling was when it came on after Cartoon Network had finished for the day and suddenly it switched to TNT and I found myself watching this enormous, bald, tanned beast of a human named Hollywood Hogan locking horns with a big pink and black beast of a man named Bret Hart. From that moment I was hooked. I looked on X and saw one lass saying “All ya’ll celebrating Hulk Hogan’s passing are pieces of shit. Cancelled for using a word we all use”. I simply replied “Well you haven’t used it”

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1209): Wed 23rd Jul 2025

We set off this morning through Northern Italy and ended up in a town centre in Ancona. I decided to go for a little walk around looking for stuff to photograph because the photos I’ve taken already are pretty dire and I worry that they will fail to convince people that I even left Darlington. It actually was a nice little place with some stunning architecture thought the two main things I gleaned from the limited time I got to spend in Ancona is that comedian Sean Lock is revered as a God by local graffiti artists and for some reason the buildings have nipples: 

After three hours of pottering around we finally got taken to our ship and when I pointed out to Dad that we were waiting at departure point 13 he pointed this out to all the old people waiting in the queue behind us and they practically shit themselves. The whole reason old people go on cruises in the first place is to forget about their eminent (some would say overdue) deaths and I’ve just gone and given them the fright of their lives. Dad just wanted to go straight to bed but I went for a look around the ship and to take a selfie of the first actual destination I got to experience on my damn trip. I won’t lie, the first two days were a bit of a let down but now I consider the trip to have officially begun

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1208): Tue 22nd Jul 2025

Up early to begin the next leg of our journey towards Switzerland and Italy. Although I have made countless memories during my short time in this country, mainly the cheese sandwich I had in that petrol station and the lovely piss I had in my hotel room, it was time to leave those precious memories behind and look to the next leg of the journey. Sadly I knew I wouldn’t be seeing any tourist attractions in Switzerland as we’d just be driving through the country all day just like France. I know it won’t make a bit of difference but I’m going to have to go on the Leger website and warn people that the first two days are literally nothing but motorways and petrol stations. Travelling all the way through France, Switzerland and Italy and not getting to see any sites is quite frankly outrageous. Also I probably shouldn’t say this but literally everyone else on the coach except me is in their eighties and nineties so I naturally assumed that when we got to Switzerland, the country that pioneered assisted dying, they’d be getting off but apparently not. After a nice breakfast we set off out of France and through Switzerland which I have to say has some breathtaking mountainous regions but again it would be nice if we could’ve gotten off for ten minutes and experienced them rather than just glance at them from the bus. We stopped off at a service station and I was astonished to see that they had a robot arm that could make drinks. The reason I was so shocked is because this is the wanking arm I invented ten years ago that mysteriously went missing one day. Now the Swiss are taking my beautiful creation and making it prepare iced tea for tourists?! Damn these yodelling bastards. After we got back on the bus the tour guide was stood outside looking angry because one of the old people was still in the building while he was ready to go. Yes, come on for God sake we don’t want to miss out on all the beautiful Italian petrol stations do we? Over the next ten hours I watched the entire first season of Squid Game which I’ve known about for a while but never bothered to check out until now. It’s pretty much what I expected it would be but that still doesn’t change the fact that it’s brilliantly entertaining and beautifully shot. The episode where they cross over the glass bridge in particular is magnificent. I’ve said in the past I’m not a fan of streaming as I much much much preferred when we had to wait a week for the next episode and during that week got to digest and reflect on what we’d seen. However I can’t deny that streaming is certainly handy when you’re travelling from one side of a country to another and aren’t allowed to see any of it. We ended the day in a hotel in Parma, Italy which the tour guide said was famous for Parmesan and Parma Ham and I chipped in with “Don’t forget that band, Emerson Lake and Parma”…none of the old people laughed but that’s probably because they were still a bit salty about my assisted dying comment from earlier. As soon as I got into the room and connected to WiFi I got a message from my sister telling me Ozzy Osbourne had died. I sent her one back asking “What did he die of? Everything?”. Seriously though this was devastating news as Ozzy was not only a true original but he was also brilliantly (and possibly unintentionally) funny which endears me to anyone. It’s crazy to think he just did his big farewell concert three weeks ago which has now turned out to be his literal farewell. I know the last few years haven’t been easy for Ozzy following his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Not being able to perform anymore must be absolutely devastating especially when you have such a dedicated following like Ozzy’s. I can only hope that Sharon uses a bubble machine at his funeral as a nice little in-joke to see off the Prince Of Darkness. 

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Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (1207): Mon 21st Jul 2025

At long last the day of my European road trip had finally fucking arrived. My sister picked me up at half twelve and dropped me off at the bus station to wait for my transfer to Darlington. I assumed they’d be sending a mini-bus to pick me up but they sent a regular taxi and I had to share it with an old couple who told us about all the holidays they’ve been on and fuck me I’m already fucking bored. The old man and the taxi driver it turned out went to the same school and they spent the hour long drive reminiscing about their teachers. I felt like everyone was talking about a TV show I haven’t seen and there are no known copies for me to watch and get caught up. “Do you remember the time Mr Donovan’s knuckles swelled up really bad?” “NO I FUCKING DON’T! I WASN’T THERE!” The coach we’re going to be on for the next three weeks is pretty nice and the seat my arse is going to be in is really comfortable. Right as we set off the tour guide let us know that the toilet is quite small and automatically stops when it’s full so we basically have to only use it when we really need to. In other words this toilets is for special pisses and shits only.I didn’t realise the coach was going on the ferry to take us into Northern France as I’d just assumed we’d be going through the EuroTunnel but we did get to hop off the bus once it was in the ferry and have a little walk around and get some food. In the itinerary for this holiday it says that we travel through France and Italy but I assumed that they would organise some sort of activity or attraction for us to do in each country even if it was just a little village or vineyard to walk around…I was wrong. We literally travelled for five hours through Northern France and stopped only at petrol stations so we could eat a sandwich and take a shit…not at the same time. At one point the guide told us that we’d be passing a two thousand year old cathedral and if we looked left when he told us then we might be able to glance it. This means that the people who organised this tour thought “Shall we make this cathedral part of the tour? “Nah we’ll just drive past it”. We ended up staying in a place called Reims which by all accounts is, to quote Tom Hanks in The Simpsons Movie: nowhere near where anything is or ever was. After I got checked in I went for a little walk around the surrounding area and there was a mural of a lion drawn outside the hotel and a monument on a roundabout of a plane which is apparently to mark the place where the first cross country plane ride across Europe ended…that’s about it. Not the best start to a holiday but hopefully after a nice nights sleep I’ll be in a better mood as we head towards Sarajevo and Transylvania.